By Alex Binkley
After months if not years of writing, the story is finished and the crucial job of editing it well begins. You have plenty of goals in this step—making sure it makes sense, will hold a reader’s attention and doesn’t contain grammar and spelling mistakes. You can also work at removing repetitious and superfluous words.
As you probably wrote it on your computer, print it in a different font and edit the paper version making notes about areas that need fixing. After you’ve inputted the changes, hopefully your manuscript will be error free, tighter and better over all. Make sure you back up the story several different ways. I use memory sticks and my Gmail account.
Then you reach the day when you think it’s ready to be read by others. Beta readers are invaluable if they are experienced writers or possess expertise in your genre. My science fiction stories have been aided by readers with real science creds. Hopefully the beta readers will also be proficient at catching any remaining spelling and grammar errors and other slip ups.
There are other editing tricks. One is to read the manuscript from the end to the beginning. When you read it the usual way, you can become caught up in the storyline, which you are already familiar with. If you read it backward starting with the last paragraph, you actually check it line by line. You’ll be surprised at how many missing words and punctuation marks you’ll find to say nothing of those characters or places that sneak into the wrong part of the story.
It’s during this process that it’s a good time to turn on the Pilcrow. What’s that you wonder? It’s the old mark for a paragraph. If that doesn’t help you find it in the assortment of editing tools at the top of the page, search online for Pilcrow and you will receive far more information than you probably ever wanted to know about it. In my computer’s Windows 10 program, it’s in the middle in the first row of editing marks and tools when the Home button is selected.
Turned on, the Pilcrow will reveal all the editing marks and more in your story. It’ll show a dot for the proper space between words. You can find out if you’ve properly and consistently indented the paragraphs. At the end of the paragraph it’ll tell you if you have left extra spaces between the final period and the pilcrow, which moves the computer to the new paragraph. Extra spaces between words and sentences and at the end of paragraphs are generally considered as the mark of a real amateur.
Another good editing trick is to read the manuscript out loud. That will help you find clumsy wording and missing words. Some people even record themselves reading the story and play the recording so they can hear how it sounds.
If you have any editing tricks you’d like to share, email me at alex.binkley@sympatico.ca
Alex Binkley 